Improve your golf with satellite maps

Stratospheric tracking: brainwave or balls?

Common Topics

The Internet and its possibilities has got people thinking like never before - but then there is such a thing as. getting carried away. Now if someone had told you three years ago that they intended to hire satellites to track people's golf balls around a course, you'd have tapped them on the head and asked if everything was alright in there. But that is just what Golflogix.com reckons it is going to do. Golfers will be given a pocket-sized thingy which they place over the ball before each shot and presumably press a button of some kind. The thingy sends the ball's position to a tracking satellite orbiting the earth a couple of thousands of miles away. Once you have completed your round, you should then be able to go to Golflogix's Web site and see how you played each hole. This information will help you improve your game, according to the site's founders, who say money will come from leasing the tracking equipment to clubs, advertising and selling the acquired information to manufacturers. We foresee a few problems with this plan. For example, isn't it going to be prohibitively expensive to rent satellites? Also, non-military satellites aren't all that accurate, when it comes to positioning, which kinda ruins the point of all this. Plus, each course will have to be carefully tracked before golfers can use it so they know where the ball landed relative to the course. Plus, is looking at a chart of where your ball landed on each hole actually very useful as a training tool? Surely you would know where your ball landed - it's getting the ball where you want it that's the hard part. But, as golflogix founders are sure to know, we are not dealing with normal people here. Sorry golf fans, but you do tend to be on the wrong side of obsessive compulsive when it comes to improving your game. A whole industry of useless gadgets exists for people who will simply never be very good at the game. But the beauty of golf is that one in a hundred shots will be perfect, leading poor souls to believe that they might just be the best golf player ever born. Money is no object to the obsessed and satellites printouts of well-played holes will no doubt be framed in country houses the world over. Golflogix is starting in the US and then moving to Britain and Japan. We have no idea whether it will be a success.